Finding Your Soul by David Anderson
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The Canaanite Woman
just schooled the Messiah. She came out of the crowd, a Canaanite, begging Jesus to heal her daughter afflicted by a demon. The disciples tell Jesus to get her out of here, “for she is crying after us.” At first Jesus tries to dodge the whole scene. “I was sent only to the lost sheep…
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Bathsheba
is known only as a bathing beauty, as the voluptuous partner in King David’s famously tragic tryst. Like many silent women in the Bible, however, we have to work to recover her story (2 Samuel 11 & 12). The king is strolling on his roof when he sees her, bathing. But this isn’t likely our…
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The Woman Who Touched Jesus’ Hem
was dying not of her hemorrhages but of her deadly isolation. Here’s her story. “Now there was a woman who had been suffering from hemorrhages for twelve years; and though she has spent all she had on physicians, no one could cure her” (Luke 8: 43-48). Almost certainly this patient was suffering from menorrhagia, excessively…
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The Persistent Widow
teaches us how to access and trust the God within. Jesus tells a parable about a vulnerable widow who goes before a jerk of a judge who “neither feared God nor cared what people thought ” (Luke 18:1-8). He brushes her off, again and again. But she keeps after him, until finally he relents and…
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Eve
lived in a world without a past to go on. First Woman. She had no predecessors to look to. Imagine this. Eve appears one day in a lush garden, having no idea where she came from. There’s only one other human, a man, and he is her husband. She reaches for too much of this…
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Poor Wayfaring Stranger
On Saturdays our companions are musicians. To accompany all those we’ve followed through Wild Places this week, I can’t think of a better song than “Poor Wayfaring Stranger.” It speaks of someone wandering, far from home. And it’s sung by Rhiannon Giddens, an Afro-Irish singer whose rendition will rend your heart. Watch and listen, and…
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Ruth
is a heroine of faith because she aspired to something greater than survival. We only meet this Moabite woman because an Israeli family, in the middle of a devastating famine, flees Bethlehem in search of food. Naomi and her husband Elimilech arrive in Moab, their two sons marry Moabite women—Orpah and Ruth—and then all the…
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Shadrach, Meshach & Abednego
are fire walkers. These three young Jewish men were exiled in Babylon because King Nebuchadnezzar had defeated Israel and brought them to his kingdom as captives. Yet like their fellow Israelite, Daniel, the three were recognized as gifted and rose to prominence in the court of Nebuchadnezzar (Daniel 3:1-30). All wonderful—until Nebuchadnezzar did the typical…
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Noah
was undoubtedly bored. Ever since humans took to the waves, ennui has been aboard. Like war, life at sea can be “interminable boredom punctuated by moments of terror.” In the psychological doldrums, sailors carved scrimshaw, made up sea shanties, sang them over and over, played cards, drank beer and rum. Noah’s voyage was worse for…